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EMR4410.1177/1754073912445814DixonEmotion Review 4458142012

Emotion Review Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2012) 338­–344 © The Author(s) 2012 ISSN 1754-0739 DOI: 10.1177/1754073912445814 “”: The History of a Keyword in Crisis er.sagepub.com

Thomas Dixon School of History, Queen Mary, of London, UK

Abstract

The word “emotion” has named a psychological category and a subject for systematic enquiry only since the . Before then, relevant mental states were categorised variously as “appetites,” “passions,” “affections,” or “sentiments.” The word “emotion” has existed in English since the 17th century, originating as a translation of the French émotion, a physical disturbance. It came into much wider use in 18th-century English, often to refer to mental experiences, becoming a fully fledged theoretical term in the following century, especially through the influence of two Scottish -physicians, Thomas Brown and Charles Bell. This article relates this intellectual and semantic history to contemporary debates about the usefulness and meaning of “emotion” as a scientific term.

Keywords affection, emotion, definitions, history, passion, semantics

“Emotion” has, since 1884, been a theoretical keyword at the language” in English, and whether, in light of the answers to heart of modern . In that year wrote an these questions, it can be expected to operate as part of a truly influential article in entitled “What Is an Emotion?” A cen- scientific lexicon. An historical perspective can help to answer tury and a quarter later, however, there seems to be little scientific these questions. consensus on the answer to his question, and some are beginning Historians have long recognised the importance of keywords to wonder whether it is the very category of “emotion” that is the as both mirrors and motors of social and intellectual change problem. (Dixon, 2008; Williams, 1976). This is especially true in the Izard’s (2010a) interviews with leading emotion , realms of culture and thought, where new words, or new mean- together with responses from other experts, powerfully demon- ings attached to old ones, can create new concepts, and even strate that, despite the continuing proliferation of books, jour- new worldviews, which in turn transform people’s ability to nals, conferences, and theories on the subject of “emotion,” imagine, experience, and understand themselves. Psychological there is still no consensus on the meaning of this term. Some categories and concepts in particular have this reflexive rela- even believe that it should be thrown out of psychology alto- tionship with our mental lives, and colouring as well as gether. Among the scientists surveyed by Izard, there was mod- explaining them (Khalidi, 2010; R. Smith, 2005, 2007). The his- erate support for the view that the term “emotion” is “ambiguous tory of the term “emotion” as a keyword of just this kind is both and has no status in ,” and that it should therefore be shorter and more eventful than its modern users might imagine. abandoned (2010a, pp. 367–368). “Emotion” is certainly a key- Although the word “emotion” (imported into English from the word in modern psychology, but it is a keyword in crisis. Indeed, French émotion) was in use in the 17th and 18th centuries, it did as I shall suggest below, it has been in crisis, from a definitional not become established as the name for a category of mental and conceptual point of view, ever since its adoption as a states that might be systematically studied until the mid-19th psychological category in the 19th century. century. The present article uses the intellectual history of this Izard’s recent article and several of the responses to it (White, term to offer an historical diagnosis of the contemporary defini- 2010; Widen & Russell, 2010; Wierzbicka, 2010) ask questions tional malaise, and to offer a reminder of some of the ideas about the language of “emotion”: whether it forms part of a uni- about passions, affections, and that have been forgot- versal human “,” whether it is part of “ordinary ten during the last two centuries.

Author note: I am grateful to the editor of this journal, to two anonymous readers, and to Emily Butterworth for their feedback on an earlier draft of this article, and to the Wellcome Trust for a research grant awarded to Queen Mary, University of London, on the theme of “Medicine, Emotion, and Disease in History.” Corresponding author: Thomas Dixon, School of History, Queen Mary, University of London, London E1 4NS, UK. Email: [email protected] Dixon “Emotion”: Keyword in Crisis 339

As Izard (2010b) rightly points out about the current debates, to withhold his assent from the judgement underlying that incip- the problem is not that the term “emotion” has no clear mean- ient passion, thus retaining his composure and peace of mind, ing, but that it has many meanings (2010b, p. 385). This has his apatheia. The Stoics aimed thus to use a kind of cognitive been the case historically too. I have divided this article into therapy to remain free of passions and perturbations of the three sections which correspond to three different dimensions of mind, while still being able to enjoy milder positive feelings those multiple meanings: categories, concepts, and connota- known as eupatheiai (Annas, 1992; Sorabji, 2000). tions. By thinking about categories, we can investigate which The response of Augustine and Aquinas to this Stoic view mental states have been thought to fall into the category of was twofold. In one way, they agreed with the Stoics: The pas- “emotion,” and what alternative mental typologies have been sions were indeed violent forces that could conflict with reason used, especially those which made a fundamental distinction and lead an individual into sin. But, on the other hand, they did between “passions” and “affections.” Secondly, by looking at not agree that a state of complete Stoic apatheia was one to be the multiple concepts that have been named by the single term wished for. As Augustine put it, someone who no longer trem- “emotion,” we can ask what theorists have intended to claim bled from fear or suffered from sorrow would not have won true about a mental or bodily state by calling it an “emotion.” From peace, but would rather have lost all humanity (Augustine, the outset, there was ambiguity and confusion. Finally, in the 1966, XIV.9). It was important for theologians to be able to dis- realm of connotations, we have access to those broader intel- tinguish between those troubling movements of the —appe- lectual, linguistic, and disciplinary frameworks within which tites, lusts, desires, passions—that the good Christian should keywords function. We will see that the different cultural terri- avoid, and those more virtuous and Godly affections of love and tories within which the words “passions” and “emotions” oper- to which they might rightly aspire. For Aquinas, the ated gave them different roles in the production of both mental passions and affections were movements of two different parts experiences and of psychological theories. These reflections on of the soul, namely the appetite and the intellectual connotation will pave the way for some brief concluding appetite respectively. The latter was another term for the will. thoughts on “emotion” as a term in both everyday and scientific This distinction between passions of the sense appetite and language in the 21st century, and the morals we can draw from affections of the intellectual appetite, although interpreted vari- history. ously by different theorists and only rarely elaborated in detail, undergirded moral-philosophical thought for many centuries. The distinction was explicitly discussed in several philosophical Categories works (e.g., Charleton, 1701; Hutcheson, 1728/1742). A treatise The first books written on the subject of “the emotions” appeared about religious affections by the American preacher and phi- between the 1830s and 1850s (Bain, 1859; Cooke, 1838; Lyall, losopher Jonathan Edwards emphasised that affections were 1855; Ramsay, 1848). Until then, , physicians, mor- movements of the intellectual part of the soul: alists, and theologians generally used more than one term with which to theorise about mental states which would later be des- Holy affections are not heat without light, but evermore arise from some ignated “emotions.” Theorists distinguished especially between information of the understanding, some spiritual instruction that the mind “passions” on the one hand and “affections” on the other. In 1836 receives, some light or actual knowledge. (Edwards 1746/1959, p. 266) the English polymath William Whewell commented that the pro- posal to refer to what he called “the desires and affections” of The 18th century saw a proliferation of new ideas about senti- human as “the Emotions” had not been generally accepted. ments and sensibility, as well as about passions and affections. Even as late as 1862, Whewell was expressing his preference for But in almost all theoretical works, the various feelings and the compound phrase “the desires and affections,” while emotions of the human heart and intellect were understood to acknowledging that the term “emotional” had been adopted by fall into at least two categories: the more violent and - some recent writers (Whewell footnotes to Mackintosh, 1862, regarding “passions” and “appetites” on the one hand, and the pp. xlv, 79; see also Dixon, 2003, pp. 186–187). milder and more enlightened “interests,” social “affections,” In order to understand this all-important distinction between and “moral sentiments” on the other (DeJean, 1997; Dixon, troubling desires and passions on the one hand and milder affec- 2003; Hirschman, 1997). A multivolume work on the passions tions and sentiments on the other, we need to look back briefly and affections of the mind composed in the early 19th century to ancient debates between and Christianity. An analy- by the physician and philosopher Thomas Cogan restated the sis of works by two of the most influential medieval Christian semantic distinction between passions and affections, noting theologians, and , reveals that in common usage the word “passion” was often applied to that it was their desire to provide an alternative to the moral “the evil propensities,” while “affection” was used for the “vir- of the Greek and Roman Stoics that led to their crea- tuous propensities; as the social, friendly, parental, filial affec- tion of the distinction between passions and affections (Dixon, tions” (1802, p. 3). And, as we have already seen, as late as 1862 2003). The Stoics had famously treated all the passions as dis- Whewell was expressing his preference for the compound eases of the soul, from which the wise man could be cured by phrase “the desires and affections.” the application of calm reason. When the Stoic sage felt the This more differentiated typology was lost with the rise of the “first movements” of a passion stirring with him, he was advised capacious new category of “emotion” during the 19th century. 340 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4

The key figure in this transition was the Edinburgh professor of Descartes had attempted to introduce the term émotion as an moral philosophy Thomas Brown, whom I have previously des- alternative to passion in his theoretical treatise on the passions ignated the “inventor of the emotions” (Dixon, 2003, p. 109). of the soul (DeJean, 1997; S. James, 1997). His suggestion was Brown subsumed the “appetites,” “passions,” and “affections” not generally followed, however, and the earliest works to make under a single category: the “emotions.” The word “emotion” frequent use of “emotion” as a term for feeling, passion, and was already in wide usage, but in Brown’s lectures, first pub- related states of mind did not appear until about 100 years later, lished in 1820, the term took on a newly systematic theoretical in the 1740s and 1750s. These included important philosophical role in the science of the mind. This innovation proved to be works by two central figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, popular. In arguably the first modern psychological book about Hume (1739–1740) and A. Smith (1759). Their uses of the term the emotions, the incredibly wide reach of the new category was were far from systematic, however. For them, as for many other made explicit: “Emotion is the name here used to comprehend writers in the second half of the 18th century, “emotion” func- all that is understood by feelings, states of feeling, pleasures, tioned either as an undefined and general term for any kind of pains, passions, sentiments, affections” (Bain, 1859, p. 3). Two mental feeling or agitation, or sometimes as a stylistic variant decades later, McCosh (1880) enumerated over 100 discrete for central theoretical terms such as “passion” and “affection” feeling states that fell into the category. How could anyone pos- (Dixon, 2003). sibly devise a single theory, or a simple conceptual definition, As I have already indicated, it was in the early 19th-century that could cover such a wide range of different mental states? lectures of another Scottish philosopher, Thomas Brown, that The answer is that no one could. the term “emotion” definitively took on its new status as a the- oretical category in mental science, replacing those “active powers” of the mind, the “passions” and “affections.” Brown, a Concepts physician and poet as well as a philosopher, was the first to treat “emotion” as a major theoretical category in the academic The word “emotion” first arrived on British shores from France study of the mind, and his use was the most systematic and in the early 17th century. John Florio, the translator of Michel de most influential of the period. Here, then, in the lecture halls of Montaigne’s celebrated essays, apologised to his readers for the Edinburgh University in the years between 1810 and 1820, we introduction of various “uncouth termes” from French into his arrive at the key moment in the history of our modern concepts English version of the work, including among them the word of “emotion.” “emotion” (de Montaigne, 1603, p. v). In both its French and What, then, was the definition that Professor Brown ascribed English forms, “emotion” was a word denoting physical distur- to this important new theoretical term in mental science? “The bance and bodily movement. It could mean a commotion among exact meaning of the term emotion,” Brown told his students, “it a group of people (as in the phrase “public emotion”), or a phys- is difficult to state in any form of words.” And it has remained ical agitation of anything at all, from the weather, or a tree, to so ever since. Brown did go a little further than this in trying to the (DeJean, 1997; Diller, 2010). offer a definition of the “emotions”: Increasingly, during the 18th century, “emotion” came to refer to the bodily stirrings accompanying mental feelings. The Perhaps, if any definition of them be possible, they may be defined to be Stoic idea of “first movements,” those physical stirrings that vivid feelings, arising immediately from the consideration of objects, marked the onset of a passion, was sometimes referred to with perceived, or remembered, or imagined, or from other prior emotions. the phrase “first emotions of passion,” as it was in a (Brown, 1820/2010, pp. 145–146) preached before the queen of in 1711 on the subject of “The government of passion” and also in Fielding’s 1749 novel In other words, unlike sensations, which were caused directly The History of Tom Jones (Clarke, 1738, p. 426; Fielding, 1749, by external objects, emotions were caused by the mental “con- Vol. 2, p. 306). And for some medical and philosophical writers, sideration” of perceived objects; and, unlike intellectual states, the term “emotion” was reserved for those bodily movements they were defined as noncognitive “vivid feelings” rather than which served as the external signs of inward passions and affec- as forms of thought. tions. Bentham (1789/1996) wrote that “The emotions of the Brown’s lectures exercised a very wide influence in the dec- body are received, and with reason, as probable indications of ades between 1820 and 1860, and it became standard to repeat the temperature of the mind” (1789/1966, p. 63; cf. LeBrun, his statement that the term “emotion” was difficult to define 1734, pp. 21, 34). This usage was continued into the early 19th except in terms of vividness of feeling. Although everyone century by Cogan (1802), who insisted that the term “emotions” apparently knew what an “emotion” was, theorists agreed with was properly applicable only to those “sensible changes and vis- Brown that this could not be embodied in any verbal definition ible effects which particular passions produce upon the frame” (Dixon, 2003, pp. 129–130). Two hundred years later, we are (1802, pp. 7–8). This idea, that emotions were external and vis- still living with this legacy of Thomas Brown’s concept of ible effects, also explains why the term “sensible” (meaning “emotion.” have continued to complain, at regu- outwardly observable) was so frequently applied to the term lar intervals, right up to the present, that “emotion” is utterly “emotion” in 18th-century texts (Diller, 2010, p. 150). resistant to definitional efforts (Izard, 2010a, 2010b). This is Finally, from the mid-18th century onwards, “emotion” hardly surprising for a term that, from the outset, was defined as moved from the bodily to the mental domain. As early as 1649, being indefinable. Dixon “Emotion”: Keyword in Crisis 341

Brown’s was also a strongly noncognitive concept of “emo- suggesting that: “Most of our emotions are so closely connected tion.” His stark separation between intellectual thoughts and with their expression, that they hardly exist if the body remains emotional feelings was endorsed by many of the leading psy- passive” (1872, pp. 239–240). chologists of the late 19th century. Bain (1855, 1859), McCosh In Bell’s works, then, we find the final piece of the jigsaw. (1886, 1887), Baldwin (1891), and Sully (1892) all produced Here was the source of the idea that the term “emotion” referred two-volume textbooks of psychology in which Volume 1 was to mental states that necessarily had an outward bodily expres- devoted to the and the intellect, and Volume 2 to the sion, which additionally somehow constituted the emotion. emotions, feelings, and will. Taken in combination with Brown’s influential treatment of the But Brown was not the only important early “emotion” theo- “emotions” as a very broad category of noncognitive states of rist, and so his is not the only relevant legacy. A second key feeling, we now have a clear picture of the origins of the late figure was another Edinburgh physician and philosopher, 19th-century theories of emotion which have given rise to so Charles Bell. Bell was an important figure in the history of neu- many conceptual and definitional problems. While Brown and rology and also the most influential 19th-century theorist of Bell agreed that an “emotion” was itself something mental, expression before 1872, when Darwin published his work on they differed over whether its constituents were primarily men- the subject. Bell’s theories of emotion and expression, worked tal or bodily. The tensions between these two models were out in the successive editions of his essays on the anatomy and never fully resolved. Darwin and James were both influenced philosophy of expression published between 1806 and 1844, by these works produced in Edinburgh in the opening 2 dec- provided foundations later built upon by both Darwin and ades of the 19th century. Darwin even studied medicine in James. It is well known that Darwin argued strongly against the Edinburgh briefly in the 1820s, and James stated that he spent theological notion in Bell’s work that the muscles of the human his youth immersed in philosophical works by Brown and by face had been divinely designed to express the higher senti- Brown’s predecessor in the moral philosophy chair, Dugald ments. What has only rarely been noticed, however, is that Stewart (W. James, 1902/1985, p. 2). For centuries, theorists Darwin took his main theoretical principle of expression, have debated what should be considered the true seat of the namely the idea of “serviceable associated habits,” directly emotions: the soul or the body; the heart or the (Bound from Bell’s work (Darwin, 1872; Dixon, 2003). Alberti, 2010). In view of the importance of Brown and Bell in Such is Bell’s importance, in , in this conceptual history this conceptual history, I would suggest that the true seat of the that it would be appropriate to think of him as the coinventor of “emotions” was in fact the University of Edinburgh, circa 1820 the modern “emotions” along with Brown. Where Brown was (Dixon, 2006). the key theorist of “emotions” as vivid mental feelings with men- tal causes, in Bell’s work we find a concept of “emotion” which for the first time gave a constitutive role to bodily movements. Connotations For Bell an “emotion” was a movement of the mind. His brief It is appropriate that at this stage of the argument we should definition of the term was that “emotions” were “certain changes have reached a conclusion about a particular institution and a or affections of the mind, as , joy, or astonishment,” which particular place. This reminds us that words do not operate in could become visible through “outward signs” on the face or vacuums, but rather within lexical and social networks. Words body (Bell, 1824, p. 19). The additional interest of Bell’s work, derive their meanings from the company they keep, and that however, is the importance he gave to bodily movements, espe- applies both to the other words they rub shoulders with, and to cially of the heart and lungs, as not only outward signs, but also the speakers, writers, and readers through whose , mouths, as constitutive causes of emotional experience. He recognised hands, and eyes they pass. that the idea that the emotions might “proceed from or in any The semantic connotations that were lost by the transition degree pertain to the body” might not “willingly be admitted” by from “passions” and “affections” to “emotions” in theories of his readers (Bell, 1824, pp. 20–21). Nonetheless, he tried to per- the human mind can all be grouped together under the unifying suade them that the “organs of breathing and speech” were nec- theme of pathology: cognitive, medical, or moral (Dixon, 2006, essary not only to the “expression” of emotions, but also to their 2011). “Passion” and “affection” were both terms whose ety- “development.” Bell pressed the point further, arguing that the mology and core meanings emphasised passivity, suffering, and operation of the organs of expression preceded “the mental emo- disease. For the Stoics, the passions had been diseases of the tions with which they are to be joined,” and strengthened and soul, to be cured by , and right up to the 19th directed them. He even argued that the reason that all people century the terms “passion” and “affection” were used in medi- experienced the same “internal feelings and emotions or pas- cal contexts as terms for organic disease. Passions and affec- sions” was because of the uniform operation of the bodily organs tions of the mind, especially in their stronger forms, were also (Bell, 1824, pp. 20–21). The parallel here with W. James’s considered by physicians to constitute a constant threat to health famous formulation, published six decades later, is very striking. and life. Since the key early “emotion” theorists, including W. James was certainly familiar with Bell’s work, although only Brown and Bell, were almost all trained medics, it is significant making a passing reference to him in his 1884 article (p. 191). that they chose to use a word for the vivid mental feelings which Darwin (1872) had also endorsed a similar view of the indis- detached them from this medical thought-world and its patho- pensable role of bodily movements in a fully fledged emotion, logical associations, bestowing to subsequent generations of 342 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4

mental philosophers and psychologists a newly de-medicalised theorists in the late 19th century, detached as it was from the concept (Dixon, 2006). centuries of moral and theological connotations that had accrued Questions of professional and disciplinary identity are also to the terms “passion” and “affection.” “Emotion,” for progres- germane to thinking about the detachment of “emotion” from the sives such as Ellis, was the name of a domain of scientific study established languages of morality and . Many of the most from which mere philosophers were to be barred. Competence to influential theorists of “passions” and “affections” had been discuss emotion now required a training in physiology. As moral philosophers, clergymen, or both. Preachers and theologi- W. James put it at the end of his 1884 Mind article, the or ans, as well as secular moralists, most often found themselves falsity of his theory of emotion would be best determined not by discoursing on these subjects in order to demonstrate the impor- logical analysis, but by empirical investigations undertaken by tance of governing the passions and cultivating the affections. “asylum-physicians and nervous specialists” who “alone have During the religious revivals of the 18th century, in which the the data in their hands” (1884, p. 204). feelings and sympathies of the human heart were so important, preachers such as Edwards (1746/1959) and Whitefield (1772) spoke and wrote in the language of the Bible. The terms “pas- Conclusions sions,” “lusts,” “desires,” and “affections” all had a biblical ped- So, when W. James famously asked in 1884, “What is an emo- igree. The term “passion” had an additional biblical tion?” he was not engaging with an age-old conundrum, but was through its connection with the gospel accounts of the sufferings seeking to define a psychological category that had been in and death of Jesus of Nazareth. The terms “emotion” and “emo- existence only a couple of generations. James’s answer to his tions,” by contrast, were detached from the linguistic worlds of own question, one which revealed his indebtedness to Brown, and moralism. They never appeared in any English Bell, and Darwin, was that emotions were vivid mental feelings translation of the Bible and, unlike the terms “passion” and “pas- of visceral changes brought about directly by the of sions,” were very unlikely to be paired with such moralising epi- some object in . thets as “despicable,” “detestable,” “evil,” “perverted,” or James’s theory had a curious early career. On the one hand, “vicious” (Diller, 2010, p. 150; Dixon, 2011). it became, along with the similar theory of the Danish psycholo- When modern uses of “emotion” and “emotional” emerged gist Carl F. Lange, the flagship emotion theory of the fledgling during the 19th century, they connoted knowledge of and sym- science of psychology. On the other hand, the theory entirely pathy with a modern and scientific approach to human mental failed to create consensus among the psychological community life. They were words which belonged within a secular, morally except, perhaps, a consensus that it was wrong. Within 10 years neutral, and scientific register. The linguistic shift from “pas- of the publication of James’s original theory it had been system- sions” and “affections” to “emotions” thus both reflected and atically rebutted in almost all the leading philosophical and psy- enabled shifts in institutional and intellectual authority. By the chological journals. Critics in the 1880s and 1890s argued that end of the 19th century the view was on the rise in European and James’s theory failed to distinguish between emotions and non- American that a properly scientific account of the emotions; that it failed to differentiate between the different human mind would be produced only through a thoroughly emotions; that it gave excessive priority to feelings of bodily physiological investigation. Champions of this view explicitly change at the expense of other components of emotion; and that contrasted their work with the philosophical psychology of their it unnecessarily denied the role played by cognitive and intel- predecessors (and contemporaries), which they believed was lectual factors in generating emotion. James’s article created still in thrall to theological, spiritual, and dualistic views of the further confusion by seeming to support several different claims human person. about whether all emotions had bodily expressions, or only One particularly able critic of the physiological tendency of some, and whether this was a matter of definition, or of empiri- modern psychology in general, and of James’s theory of emo- cal discovery (Dixon, 2003; Ellsworth, 1994; Feinstein, 1970). tion in particular, was David Irons. Irons argued in several arti- After ten years of rebuttals of his original theory, W. James cles in the 1890s and in his book on (1903) duly published (1894) a restatement of his views on emotion, that emotions were irreducible “attitudes” of the whole person which included so many concessions and qualifications as to (Dixon, 2003; Gendron & Barrett, 2009, p. 325). It is notable amount virtually to a retraction of his own theory. So, by the that Havelock Ellis’s response to Irons attacked him not only for 1890s, although the idea that “emotion” was the name of a psycho- his theoretical views, but for his ignorance of human physiology logical category had become entrenched, the nascent psychologi- and his reliance on the tools of philosophy. Ellis wrote that the cal community had neither an agreed definition of the extent of the problems of modern psychology required “something more than category, nor a shared idea of the fundamental characteristics of a merely logical equipment; they require a very considerable the states that fell within it. physiological and even pathological equipment” and that any- The founders of the discipline of psychology in the late 19th one who could suggest, for instance, that lacked a century bequeathed to their successors a usage of “emotion” in physical basis was evidently “not competent to discuss the which the relationship between mind and body and between nature of emotion” (Ellis, 1895, p. 160). thought and feeling were confused and unresolved, and which In summary, the term “emotion” suited the purposes of a self- named a category of feelings and behaviours so broad as to consciously secularising and scientific cadre of psychological cover almost all of human mental life including, as Bain (1859) Dixon “Emotion”: Keyword in Crisis 343

had put it, all that was previously understood by the terms “feel- likely to name either a natural kind or any kind of innate or ings, states of feeling, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, “folk” psychological concept (cf. Barrett, 2006; Rorty, 2004; affections” (1859, p. 3). Wierzbicka, 2010). On the other hand, it may be that psychol- The survey undertaken recently by Izard (2010a) reveals that ogy is not the kind of science that deals in natural kinds or innate psychologists are still living with this legacy. On the basis of the concepts. If the science of emotion is supposed to provide an replies to his questionnaire, Izard put together a composite explanation of a widely experienced kind of mental state, and in description of what contemporary emotion scientists mean by terms that can be communicated to the general public, then it “emotion.” The most commonly cited features were summa- might be better to stick with the complexity, fuzziness, and rised by Izard in one sentence: overinclusivity of “emotion” than to retreat still further from the world of everyday concerns into new scientific jargons. Emotion consists of neural circuits (that are at least partially dedicated), Let me end, however, on a constructive note, by suggesting a response systems, and a feeling state/process that motivates and third way between the retention of the problematic metacate- organizes cognition and action. (2010a, p. 367) gory of “emotion” and its abandonment in favour of studies of discrete feeling states such as love, , fear, and the rest. In Izard emphasised that this was not meant to be a definition of the conclusion of my 2003 book on this subject I was rather “emotion,” but a description of the dominant uses. Nonetheless, timid and suggested that the “old-fashioned terminology of pas- it indicates well enough the challenges that still face theorists of sions and affections” was unlikely to “find favour in future psy- “emotion,” especially the need somehow to articulate the chological theories” (Dixon, 2003, p. 245). But perhaps now assumed relationships between physiological processes and that the definitional crisis in “emotion” theories has reached a mental experiences, and between states of feeling and states of new peak, the time has come to reinstate in psychological sci- thought. Among those philosophical and psychological writers ence some version of that distinction between “passions” and of the 19th century (and before) whose works have been “affections” which structured modern thought about mind and excluded from the canon of the history of psychology, but who morality for so many centuries. Among philosophers of emo- resisted the conglomeration of “passions” and “affections” into tion, Griffiths (1997, 2003, 2004) in particular has lamented the “emotions,” who argued for the centrality of the intellect and overinclusivity of the modern category of “emotion” and argued cognition to states of feeling, and who connected psychology that it should be divided into two subcategories: the more prim- most closely to philosophy and rather than to physiology, itive “ programs” and the “higher cognitive emotions” (cf. some clues may still be found as to what went wrong in the Elster, 1999; Rorty, 2004). If the lessons of history and philoso- construction of modern concepts of “emotion” in psychology phy are taken on board, then, it is just possible that the ideas of (Dixon, 2003, 2011; Gendron & Barrett, 2009). Augustine and Aquinas might yet turn out to be just what is In the debate about whether “emotion” can today function as a needed to inspire a new scientific of emotions research scientific term, its semantic and conceptual history is, it seems to for the 21st century. me, relevant if not decisive. On the question of whether “emotion” is a “folk” or “everyday” term rather than a scientific one, there is a clear historical story to tell. “Emotion” has existed as a normal References English-language term for physical agitation since the 17th cen- Annas, J. (1992). Hellenistic . Berkeley, CA: University tury. It gradually started to be applied, in an undefined and general of California Press. way, to states of mental feeling during the 18th century. So, when Augustine, St. (1966). 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